Obfuscated Vote Counting Contest

Posted by michael on Saturday October 16, 2004 @03:01AM from the some-votes-are-more-equal-than-others dept.

Daniel Horn writes "In a flash of inspiration coming from the Obfuscated C code contest and the current E-voting scandals, I wondered if there shouldn't be a similar code obfuscation contest based on obfuscating voting results, that is, C code that appears correct but does the wrong thing when counting votes. Submit your obfuscated vote-counting code now, and the two winners will be selected on November 2 and will receive a free Vega Strike CD. Obviously incorrect code, however, is not welcome."

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Hiding... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-16 03:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

If I were doing this, I would hide the date analysis and vote rigging in another part of the program. For example, the code used to handle the screen and menus, or the network stack.
Then, you could obfuscate a call to jump the program pointer to that part of memory directly, run a tiny bit of code that appears to deal with graphics, but does something else when called with the correct offset.
The devious would be scattered about, rather than in one single vote counting function.